Spotify for Artists

Spotify announced today that it has launched Spotify For Artists. You can follow the link to get all of the details, but the first thing that strikes me is that opening up the books as it were, and moving to add services that are beneficial to musicians, is a great mix of transparency and benefit for them. One of the benefits is access to Next Big Sound analytics that will make Spotify listening data available to artists and their managers for free. Musicians will be able to see how much their music is being listened to on Spotify, which of their songs are most popular, and demographic information about their fans like age, gender and location.

The bottom line: Just like radio play, Spotify artists are compensated based on their popularity.

There’s also a Concerts & Merchandise offering:

In the upcoming months, we will also be the first music service to roll-out merchandise listings within our apps in partnership with Topspin. As with concerts, this approach will allow fans to see and buy new items from their favorite artists while providing artists a valuable new channel to advertise their Topspin merch offers. Any artist will be able to easily upload and display merch on Spotify (linking to their own merch store) using Topspin’s proven tools, and best of all, we’ll be offering this service for free!

In other news Spotify has confirmed that it has now paid out a total of more than $1 billion in royalties to-date, $500 million of which was paid in 2013 alone. Just one year ago, the total royalties paid were $500 million.

Comments

Looks like a step in the right direction. It will be smaller (but fairer) compensation than terrestrial radio play that relies on random sampling rather than census data collection. Sampling heavily favors major artists. Spotify can be totally granular in their census data collection, but the resulting payouts for most artist are still likely to amount to but a few grains of salt…your popularity in the grand scheme of things is still paramount in either world if you want a slice of the royalty pie.

David Kahl

Good start here, Dave. Its relevance to the vast majority of developing artists, however, will have to be seen over time. There’s a whole bunch more than product involved – or whatever revenue is generated, by whatever means, and how it translates into opportunities – in creating a career that warrants recording, distribution, exposure, merch, and the like.
The question remains, who is moving that elephant along? We still need to talk.